One of the utilities under Linux I’ve made use of in the last few months is Dvdstyler. It essentially will take your dvd ready video and make the DVD filesystem (as well as menus). Simple menus are very straightforward as is setting bookmarks (chapters) within a file imported into a dvd project. However… for the more interesting configurations… like having a title play immediately upon disc insert like this you might want to consult the dvdstyler wiki at sourceforge.net.
Category: Linux Tech Support
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Blacklists and rejecting mail with Sendmail
A long time ago I had found how easy it was to reject messages outright with Postfix that came from non-existent domains. You know… junk from asdflkjuasdlfkjh@imadethisupmyselfanditsnotregisteredanywhere.com
Well, since the mailserver at THIS site runs sendmail I wanted to fix sendmail the same as my home server. My home server is postfix based and uses fetchmail to pull from the website. Since I had the rules set to reject non-existent domains at home it would essentially strand messages in the account here at the website which would then need to be cleaned out manually.
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More postfix spam blocking and Whitelisting….
I almost forgot to pass along a link to a more comprehensive detailing of postfix’s anti-uce controls…. here. Also, in the last article I briefly mentioned whitelisting. IF you intend to have several blacklists active it will pay to learn how to whitelist before you HAVE to. To do so, I simply created a text file at /etc/postfix/whitelist and int hat file you enter IP address or hostname followed by OK…. like this….
1.2.3.4 OK
goodmachine.com OKBut… of course, there’s a bit more.
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More postfix spam blocking….
Postfix has a NUMBER of tools for rejecting unwanted messages before they get in the door and waste your CPU time on deciding “hey this mail is spam”. Up until recently I’ve mostly used the relays.ordb.org check (which in the last couple months has now gone defunct.) When we started noticing problems with ordb.org’s responsiveness I planned to investigate other blacklisting options and found several. Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages to blacklisting. The first disadvantage is you have turned over control of blocking mail senders to an outside authority and you should familiarize yourself with THEIR policies for listing (and delisting) a server.
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Internet Explorer 7 on linux
Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s a tremendously good idea to test what a website looks like in multiple browsers because they all have their own unique …. quirks. Of course, there are other reasons…. sites that refuse to work with anything but IE. (Blue Cross/Blue Shield for instance has some web apps that will not work with anything else.)
Well… now Internet Explorer 7 is supported by ies4linux….
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Software raid fun…. device detection order
Anyone that’s setup software raid on a system with multiple storage adapters has probably run into this kind of issue, but I thought I’d mention it. Last weekend I built a machine to replace my server (the server was to be captured into a VM). The main system was going to be installed onto dual IDE drives, the VM partition and other data on dual 400GB SATA drives. Well, install went well after getting past some of the irq issues I mentioned in a previous writeup. md0 was /boot and so on…. (md0 residing on the dual ide drives.) When the system went to reboot though it didn’t get very far. It complained of not finding a boot image (I think that was the message – didn’t make a note.)
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Mac/Linux/Windows usb wireless adapter D-link DWL-G122
One of the tools I looked at having for my expanding kit has been a usb wireless adapter that would work with minimal install on Windows/Mac or Linux. As you can imagine…. it’s not as straightforward as just getting one that’s compatible with Windows…. well, after much searching I found the D-Link DWL-G122 802.11g Wireless USB adapter…. (Revision B it seems is the one to get…) Anyway, using a generic driver downloadable for the Mac it will work (from ralink http://www.ralinktech.com). On linux, you have choices (isn’t that the truth…) anyway, there is a native driver (from ralink for the RT2571W/RT2671 chipset) and there’s the rt2x00 driver project and it’s also possible (and fairly easy) to install the Windows driver via ndiswrapper.
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Is something up with ordb.org?
I’ve noticed several times in the last week a server of mine that is using postfix has rejected messages due to a failure in the lookup at relays.ordb.org. At first, I thought this was just a false positive in the database at ordb… but this morning I finally “caught it” while it was happening and went to pull up the ordb.org web page. It took…. 30-45 seconds and then proceeding to do a search on the rejected IP took another stretch. In looking at the logs it appears that there may be blanket rejections if the ordb.org check times out.
Here’s the postfix config setting….
smtpd_client_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org -
VMware guest unable to access USB devices
I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )
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PDF printing in Ubuntu
One of the things I have a tendency to do is save licence key – web confirmation pages to a pdf by printing. It gives a good capture of the document and saves me from actually having another paper to find a place to file. But, ubuntu (dapper) doesn’t seem to be setup for pdf printing by default. Fortunately, it’s not too hard to set up…. install cups-pdf (apt-get install cups-pdf), navigate to System -> Administration -> Printing and doubleclick to add a new printer… no pdf printer is detected… there must be work to do (click cancel). As root (“sudo nautilus”) navigate to Filesystem, then /usr/lib/cups/backend – right click cups-pdf and select properties and check “set user id”. Now, try to add a printer again and you should see PDF Printer, add it with the Generic, Postscript Color Printer (Rev 3b) driver, name it PDF-printer or something like that and now you should have PDF’s dropped into a folder in your home directory named PDF.